The Independent, 3rd
April 1991
Michael Pennington,
actor/manager of the ESC, pauses before the last lap of an international tour
The English Shakespeare Company was playing ‘Coriolanus’ in Helsinki when the US deadline to the Iraqis ran out and the war began. The Finns remained neutrally aloof, their attention on Lithuania: even after 74 years of independence, Finland is wary of where Russia’s westward eye may settle next. For us the major chords sounded as Volumnia came to plead with her son to spare Rome:
Thou
know’st great son,
The end of the war’s uncertain,
That if thou conquer Rome the
benefit
Which thou shalt thereby reap
is
such a name
Whose reputation will be
dogg’d
with curses…”
Deep in the purdah of touring, how could we
gauge the news? Selfishly, did it mean we shouldn’t leave for India in 10 days
time? Identified by the British High Commission in Delhi as a “relatively
high-risk terrorist target”, we nevertheless took the view and went: after all,
it wasn’t Pakistan.
Nothing prepares the novice for India, as everyone
knows: the affronting heat, the battered buses, the persistent air of 1947. The
ride in from Bombay airport is a fair summary – row upon row of men defecating
by the side of the road, wretched lean-tos made out of billboards declaring
that “Surf Washes Whitest” or bearing blandishments from American Express. The
code of the road encourages a speed too fast for safety, too slow for progress
(James Cameron’s words, not mine); since a pedestrian casualty could lead to
the driver being lynched, his vehicle burned and the police stoned, this is
high ante. Through the confusion and pity of it all, images of blazing beauty
suggest an infinite world beyond these horrors.
The biggest theatre tour to visit India in 30
years, we played a week in Bombay at the Homi Bhabha Auditorium, named after
the greatest physicist who, in the splitting of the atom, dreamed of the rapid
modernisation of India. The place is falling apart. Then Bangalore, where we
worked around a family of rats, under a cluster of bats hanging in the flies,
and in spite of a chipmunk that on one occasion dropped on to the stage at the
feet of Tullus Aufidius. In Delhi, the incoming audience could, while being
vigorously frisked by security, ponder at leisure a large poster announcing out
hotel, daily schedule, and details of our ongoing flight. Finally in Calcutta,
a beggar described by Geoffrey Moorhouse in his magnificent book on the place
is still on his mat on Chowringhee Lane 20 years later, his helpless cheek to the
pavement as if listening to the earth, his four stumps quivering. Vultures
wheel above him
Meanwhile the war escalated. Aufidius continued to
tear up the proffered peace treaty over the dead body of Coriolanus; in ‘The Winter’s
Tale’, the deluded intransigence of Leontes seemed characteristic of all
parties in the conflict. Movie-star portraits of Saddam Hussein, a visionary
gleam in his eye, began to appear in the Indian street-markets and one or two
of us got spat on. We got used to this; observed ‘Coriolanus’ becomingly
slightly the more popular of the two shows, came to love the audiences paying a
maximum of 30 pence a ticket and discussing the play throughout, not bothering
to applaud at the end despite their evident excitement. We were phlegmatic when
an interviewer from ‘India Times’ demanded to know why we had dressed the
Volscian army as Muslim fundamentalists – was this quite a tactful thing to do?
– and left this astounding country with our minds thrown open but also with a
seductive feeling of have done some minute good. After an overnight stop in
Bangkok on the day of the military coup, we flew into Australia for a more
sedate four weeks in temperatures of over 100 degrees – by which time the war
was over and the struggle to win the peace beginning: a sequel to ‘Coriolanus’
that Shakespeare never wrote.
In a way, he barely finished ‘Coriolanus’ – a
masterpiece that explains why idealism may be incompatible with good politics
and how dangerous it is for a man to change, but which is then allowed by
certain faltering in the last act to drop just short of ‘Macbeth’. ‘The
Winter’s Tale’, on the other hand, demands change – towards personal candour:
its acceptance of sexuality as the basis of all behaviour anticipates
psycho-analysis by centuries, and in its unflinching description of jealousy it
even dares to do without a Iago.
Doing these plays, we are once again finding that
there is no such thing as two unrelated Shakespeares: even two such diverse
pieces show more links than differences. Once again, we are assuming that the
plays were written specifically for us – perhaps even by a Shakespeare who is
somewhere in the company, working for us alone. The sense of taking the plays
direct from the pen, unprocessed by time, is our necessary aim, since
Shakespeare’s vocabulary needs to be preserved not just as an icon but as a
common coin. At the same time, these breathing works that are our articles of
faith are in ours, as in all productions, subject to certain distortion, more
the result of historical eddying than any calculated intervention of our own.
Our company is five years old next month and the
pleasure of coming into the Aldwych for our new season is great. There are
signs of acceptance in unexpected quarters: we are challenged less these days
about the rights and wrongs of modern-dress Shakespeare – what a relief to be
rid of this chestnut, since there can be nothing more classically Elizabethan
than to do the plays thus, as Shakespeare’s own company would have done. We
ourselves seem to be getting terser meanwhile, more determined, less brazenly
vociferous about our aims, which is also good, since there is less and less
time to talk.
Grim resolve, in any case, seems to be the key to
adapting again to English life – what with a dearth of new plays in the West
End; the Almeida, King’s Head and Greenwich theatres hit by Council grant cuts
and a new VAT rate which (unless seat prices are hoisted once more) will
probably cost the ESC £2,500 a week in lost income, and the British theatre at
large up to £5 million in the next year. But that a tour such as ours could
hardly be described as lotus-eating, we might feel a guilty sense of advantage,
since the crisis biting theatre companies with expensive buildings to maintain
leaves a light-footed troupe like ours strangely free – and able to pursue a
frankly optimistic dialogue with the Arts Council that encourages us to plan at
full throttle.
As we expand, we hope for a deepening achievement
and more commitment – also for houses as full as those midweek nights in
Bradford last November when ‘The Winter’s Tale’ suddenly seemed more popular
than football.